2D Materials

Modelling of graphene morphology under strain

Graphene, the 2D wonder material for discovery of which the Nobel Prize was assigned in 2010, is a key area of research at the University of Manchester, involving every school in the faculty of EPS.

We exploit our in house developed empirical force field to perform molecular dynamic simulations of grapheme sheets under external pressure. As it is confirmed experimentally free standing grapheme tends to “ripple” and loose the characteristic 2D character. However these can be exploited to create even more flexibility in the properties (e.g. opening a bandgap, doping). The details of the nature of the deformed graphene sheet are revealed by our simulations and our calculations of strain and vibrational properties of the material.

Artificial 2D layers based devices

Fifty years after tunnelling through semiconductor heterojunctions was first investigated, we are the first to demonstrate the required reproducibility, in wafer, between wafers in a given growth run, and from run to run, of the electrical properties required for manufacturing a microwave and millimetre-wave detector based on electron tunnelling through a thin semiconductor tunnel barrier layer.

We have shown unprecedented levels of run-to-run reproducibility, down from over 100% variations to 10% in 10ML AlAs barrier structure implying better than 0.06ML accuracy